Al Ross

Abraham Roth

(19 October 1911 - 22 March 2012, USA)

Al Ross was an American cartoonist and longtime contributor to The New Yorker. He was born Abraham Roth in the village of Seletyn, Romania, and lived in Vienna as a boy. The Roth family settled in East Harlem in the USA after World War I. Al Ross studied at the Art Students League and began selling his cartoons in the 1930s. His three brothers were also cartoonists.

Ross published his cartoons in a great many magazines, including Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Maclean's, as well as Humorama magazines like Snappy. Ross and his wife settled in the Bronx in 1937, the same year that Ross sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker. He kept contributing to this magazine, although intermittently, until 2002 when already in his nineties.

He also published a couple of solo cartooning books. His style became looser and more minimalist throughout the years, and he eventually drew directly in ink with no preliminary sketching in pencil.

Twist Turner by "Four Roth Brothers" (Prize Comics #9, 1941)

However Al Ross has sometimes used multiple panels for his cartoons, his only contributions to comic books were the 'Twist Turner' features that appeared in Prize Comics in 1940-41. The comic stories were signed "Four Roth Brothers" and were a cooperation between Al Ross and his brothers Irving Roir, Ben Roth and Salo.